Flavors

CARTO is an open-source geospatial platform that can be installed locally or used remotely from our fully-managed cloud service.

Cloud

CARTO is offered as a service in the cloud (Software-as-a-Service, SaaS). This is generally the preferred option for most of our users, as it provides them with the full CARTO experience without the hassle of installing, maintaining and scaling the platform.

Our cloud services are available from different locations, and make use of world-wide distributed Content Delivery Network (CDN) cache networks to ensure we offer the highest performance while remaining compatible with local privacy legislation.

CARTO in the cloud is continuously being updated with new features, bug fixes and improvements. We offer commercial support to help you get the best out of the platform at any time.

On-Premises

CARTO can be installed on a local server, or set of servers, either directly or using our commercial installer. CARTO’s commercial on-premises version is created regularly by freezing specific versions of the CARTO components, testing them throughly and wrapping them around a installer that simplifies the installation and upgrade processes for CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It also includes enterprise-level support from our engineers.

On-Premises installations are typically favored by users who have special security requirements or who want to integrate with features that are not available in the cloud, like certain authentication mechanisms or database connectors.

CARTO provides a set of management tools for our on-premises version that allows you to programmatically provision, monitor, and automate components of your environment.

Tip: You can learn more about CARTO On-Premises by browsing its documentation.

Open Source

CARTO believes in the open source way and we have benefitted from the ecosystem ourselves. Since our earliest days, we have released most of the CARTO source code under an open source BSD license. As such, there are a number of community-contributed installers available on the Internet. They are not maintained or supported by us, but can also be an interesting option to explore for DIY users.

Tip: Open source installations of CARTO can be challenging to take on. Before embarking on this approach, we definitely recommend contacting our sales team who can help advise if one of our commercially supported flavors of CARTO better fits your needs and budget.